


Shadowside

by irisbleufic



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Dreams, M/M, Nightmares, Sleep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-09-24
Updated: 2007-09-24
Packaged: 2018-01-02 11:30:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1056246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irisbleufic/pseuds/irisbleufic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Regardless of what you are, sleep will eventually take you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shadowside

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written and posted to LJ in September of 2007.

In the Beginning, it was given to men and angels to dream.

To men, it was given because they had very little say in the matter. Without rest, they discovered that their fragile bodies would tire, then exhaust—even to the loss of breath and pulse. With the necessity of rest came the discovery of sleep and the darkness beyond. In that place, it was said that God was everywhere, or nowhere. It was there that visions came into being, uncreated and often whole. They simply _came_ , and they carried with them the greatest joys and sorrows yet unknown to man.

To angels, it was given because sometimes they, too, slept, even though it was not strictly needed. It seemed that any beings of considerable consciousness, mortal or immortal, were subject to the vagaries of sleep. Whether God dreamed or not, no one knew, but it was supposed that surely the Morningstar and his innumerable host had created the worst of these visions— _nightmares_ , men came to call them—and set them loose upon the world. Nearly half the host of Heaven swore off sleep.

For it was given to men to dream all things: past, present, and future.

And it was given to angels to dream that which had been, and was.

*

 

**That Which Had Been**  


Crowley wakes, as usual, with a shout.

Sometimes, the shout is a scream, and more often, the shout is a sob that quickly becomes more sobs than can reasonably crowd in his throat. It's times like these that he would be glad breathing isn't necessary, but he never gets as far as thinking about that. He only gets as far as knocking his overpriced clock radio off the bed stand in an attempt to switch on the light. Tears blur his vision, burning.

_The girl could not have been more than twelve. Half of her fingernails were missing, bloody shreds of flesh trailing from the tips of her blue-white fingers, and half of her face was unrecognizable. Some kind of blunt trauma—a fist, a club, a cannon ball._

_The men in the dungeon wore grimy armor and grimier clothes, and they eyed Crowley up and down before deciding that the gold he'd given them was good enough payment in exchange for an explanation. One of them nudges the girl's bloody, broken foot with the toe of his boot and says, "There's not much to tell."_

_"I doubt it," said Crowley, already dizzy enough to stumble if not for the wall behind him. "What did she do? What did_ you _do?"_

_"It's orders," said the man, shrugging. "She set a curse upon a great man's wife."_

_Crowley scents no enchantment upon the corpse, no pact. He would have remembered her. Then again, her face was so distorted that his memory would not serve even if it wished. The girl's skirts were half torn away, exposing the burn-marks on her thighs._

_"Orders." Crowley staggered into the next room, fumbling at his belt for more gold._

The kitchen is not as Crowley remembers having left it, all shadows and a shaft of eerie light pouring through the window and into the sink. He pounds at the light-switch with his fist, and nothing happens—except for long, flickering moments of silence where instead he should hear the crotchety old fixture overhead blinking to life. 

He curses and lurches for the sink, barely in time.

_There was no logic to it, no one to explain why the middle-aged man slumped naked on the wooden stool had no marks upon his body. He was dead, that much was certain. Crowley couldn't find a pulse, and neither of them could keep their balance._

_"Oh, that one," said a voice from the doorway. The older man, brandishing his dagger._

_"Yes, this one," Crowley managed, finding the closest thing to hold onto, which was the stool. He was on his knees, and the corpse had fallen aimlessly to the floor._

_"Not a thing," the guard told Crowley. "His heart stopped before we could start."_

_"Before you could start," Crowley repeats, for once unable to blink because he can't._

Shaking, Crowley wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He'd make tea, but the thought wrenches a short, bitter laugh from deep in his belly. Tea is just as bitter as bile, and he doesn't usually take much sugar. The idea of milk is intolerable.

_To walk out of Hell without glancing once behind is impossible. Even humans and their gods know that, and Crowley knows it much, much better than most._

_The woman being dragged out from farther within the shadows was not dead, but she was not alive, either. Seeing Crowley, or perhaps not seeing him, she blinked her pale eyes and reached with feeble, skeletal arms before the guard struck them down._

_Crowley set his eyes straight ahead, rushing for the door, for light, for air._

_Next time he saw Aziraphale, he'd kill him for not having been there._

Crowley spends the next ten minutes with his face buried in a damp dish towel, which doesn't help, because it smells vaguely like washing-up liquid and stale coffee. He throws it in the sink, and, arms braced on the edge of the counter, tells himself that these things, too, have passed. That killing Aziraphale wouldn't have helped even if he'd wanted it to. Crowley scans the countertop to no avail, doubling over the sink.

The angel had been given orders, and so had he.

* 

 

**That Which Was**  


Aziraphale wakes with a gentle start, his eyes open wide in the darkness. As usual, it takes him several long seconds to remember where he is. This time, he's sitting in the armchair that he keeps tucked in one of the upstairs rooms, well out of Crowley's sight because Crowley never tires of telling him that it went out of fashion decades ago.

_In spite of it all, the chair was comfortable, and Aziraphale had some leisurely reading to catch up on. He turned the pages more slowly, somehow, and the words became garbled. He couldn't read more than a sentence or two before he'd already forgotten how the phrase started, and he backed up again, flustered._

_The book was nothing special, not by most people's standards, which is why Aziraphale had bought it. There was more damage to the pages than he had hoped, which meant that it would prove either infinitely sellable or completely unfit for merchandise. He couldn't decide which. He tried to start the chapter over again and found the chapter heading illegible. It was in a language that he didn't know._

The book in Aziraphale's lap has fallen neatly on its spine, pages fanned out like spider-legs. Aziraphale gathers the book shut and smoothes the hard cover from corners to spine, instinctively seeking damage it may have sustained when he dropped it. Somewhere in the corner of his mind, Crowley says there's no way it could have sustained damage. Aziraphale feels compelled to snap at him even in his absence.

At a glance, the book is in plain English. Eighteenth-century English, but plain enough.

_Something about the unintelligibility of the language was off; it wasn't the words themselves, but the way Aziraphale's mind seemed to process them. They were fleeting and ungraspable, as if part of his mind was distracted by something far more important. His attention span rarely suffered, as paying single-minded attention, to books especially, had always been simple._

_A pale flash of motion caught Aziraphale's eye, and it was then that he realized the window was open. The curtains had caught the breeze, fluttering like a distress signal._

Aziraphale doesn't remember having opened the window, but it's open, gaping wide. He's just noticed that the dingy white curtains are flapping madly into the room, lashing at the darkness as if to beat it back. The moonlight seems unusually pale.

 _In Aziraphale's lap, the book had fallen open again. The pages flipped lightly, borne on the eerie draft. The language was perfectly discernable now, and it spoke of the nature of dreams and nightmares, and how one may wake in the night and know that one's beloved, far away or not so distant, may, too, be waking from some terror_.

Leaving the book, Aziraphale rises and goes in search of his coat. It's early spring, and the nights are still fragile with chill despite the daffodils and crocuses that have begun to bloom. There are not many gardens near Aziraphale's residence, but where he is going, there will be dozens of them lining the posh pavements.

With or without orders, Aziraphale always did find Crowley difficult to ignore.

*

For it was also given to men and angels to comfort, and to be comforted.

And it was given to all, in so doing, to be loved.


End file.
